Set on an English country manor estate in the early 20th century, the wealthy Hardcastle family are throwing a party for their friends. Except tragedy is about to strike: their returning wayward daughter Evelyn will die at 11pm – whodunit? The murderous Footman stalking the grounds, the mysterious Plague Doctor haunting the shadows, or any number of suspicious guests with questionable motives? Aiden Bishop, a man without a past, sets out to solve the case. And then a strange thing happens after Evelyn dies: the day repeats itself. Evelyn dies again and again at the same time and Aiden wakes up each day in the body of a different host. As much whadafuq as whodunit, Agatha Christie meets Groundhog Day meets Quantum Leap in Stuart Turton’s The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.
It’s an intriguing premise and an original take on the well-defined country house murder mystery story but the book unfortunately got steadily worse after a fairly decent first third and never improved.
The setup is both the selling point of the book and also easily its weakest aspect because it’s so confusing. So Aiden will live the same day eight different times, each day in a different host. I took that to mean that if Aiden fails to identify the murderer then Evelyn dies and the day starts over with everything going back to their starting positions. Except it seems that previous actions Aiden took as previous hosts carry over into the next same day. But why would that be? It’s never explained.
How is Aiden able to occasionally, accidentally, jump from host to host during the day? And when he does, is he jumping back to the day when he was that host or is he the host on the same day as he is another host?
Aiden shares the same headspace as the host and his personality is slightly affected by whichever host he’s in. So they’re still in there and aware of not being totally in control of their bodies – kinda like in Being John Malkovich, I guess? – but they don’t seem freaked out by it…? And then towards the end Aiden talks about actually carrying all eight hosts with him into each host every time – whaaaat??
The rules are just so tricky, vague and overcomplicated, it felt frustratingly arbitrary as things just seemed to happen to suit the increasingly convoluted plot. And, good grief, is this story convoluted! Though Stuart Turton is able to stop the same day’s events becoming stale or repetitive to read thanks to switching perspectives, it does make for an overlong narrative, most of which wasn’t terribly gripping. Even if the rules were clear it still wouldn’t matter as the story got very tedious before the halfway mark.
There were far too many characters to keep track of. Some were quite memorable like the morbidly obese rich man Ravencourt, his shady valet Cunningham, the even shadier Stanwin, and Evelyn herself. The Footman however remained drearily one-dimensional throughout, hunting Aiden for no reason and leering like a pantomime villain, while the appearance of Helena Hardcastle, Evelyn’s mother, notable for her lengthy absence, was so anticlimactic when she did appear.
Everything about the ending was disappointing and unsatisfying. From what was really going on/why all of this was happening, to the motivations of the killer, Aiden’s own motivations, the reveal of the Plague Doctor’s identity, and the resolution of the story. Given that there are no real consequences to anything (it all resets if Aiden fails to solve the case in eight days and goes on indefinitely), there’s absolutely no tension to the narrative ever and, while it presents itself as different from other country house murder mysteries, it falls back on the same hackneyed tropes like the killer being all too eager to explain themselves at the end. And if you were curious as to what the “half” in the title might refer to, that too has a mundane explanation: it was added due to a clash with the similarly titled book, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.
Turton keeps you guessing throughout, the premise is original, some of the characters’ stories are interesting and the novel is compelling nearly half the time, but the flaws were too overwhelming for me. Aiden’s jumping around was never fully understandable, the narrative sags too much with too many characters doing too many dull, pointless things, and the final act fails on all fronts leaving a corny aftertaste. I found The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle to be bloated, dull and gimmicky.
For a better book that pulls off the “multi-narrator story revolving around a deathly mystery” far more effectively and enjoyably, I recommend Iain Pears’ masterful novel An Instance of the Fingerpost, and anyone after the epitome of the country house murder mystery would do well to check out the excellent movie Gosford Park.
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